Chapters of Chastication

Exercise in Supidity
2005-05-27 01:12:26 (UTC)

Dogging It: Chapter One

It was the early part of a Monday morning and the noise of
a vehicle sputtering into a start and rumbling away from
the curb where hit had been stopped seemed to stir the
other cars parked along the lane into motion. Car doors
opened amidst the sound of drunken laughter and footsteps
that shuffled on cracked cement walkways.

Headlights beamed and bounced against the graffiti covered
bricks of the various semi-detached houses crumbling after
thirty or so years of having been laid there by uncaring
hands. Within moments the street was all but deserted as a
few stragglers lurched from side to side, their crooked
shadows falling over the refuse left in the wake of yet
another weekend of debauchery.

The smoke stacks of moldering factoring buildings built
haphazardly on unkempt, trash-littered fields spewed their
thick black coils of filth into the air where the hung as a
dense, suffocating smog. If the sun rose in this corner of
hell that protruded from such a desolate and forsaken piece
of earth that the denizens of the area called home, it
failed to shine.

It was a place here the maladapted and malcontent found
themselves disposed of by the more progressive and
discerning society. It as where the obtuse were gathered
much in the same way as refuse was pushed into heaps that
formed clusters impossible to maneuver without suffering
some assault on the person, senses, or sensibilities.

A police siren sounded in the distance as a hunched figure
of a man pushed away from a doorway with a totter. He was
a man of slight build with a belly that protruded from
between the blue striped soiled panels of an unbuttoned
nightshirt.

An old man, with a thatch of thinning hair, weak chin, and
fleshy jowls, he had the look of one not far from finding
himself boxed and tossed into a compact grave. Unshaven and
unwashed, he could have passed as one of the previous
evening’s sexual deviants, had a person been intoxicated
enough to believe that someone as homely as him would
engage with him in such a manner.

On closer inspection it seemed obvious that he had spent a
portion of his time either in self-gratification or in
relieving himself. His pajama bottoms were torn around the
hem and bore the stains of too many nights worn without
being changed. The front flap was left unbuttoned so that
the miniscule representation of manhood would have almost
been noticeable if under the lens of a high-powered
telescope used to find new planets in far off galaxies.

The man staggered the three odd steps to the edge of his
lot and dragged a hand under the hooked nose to redirect
the flow of snot trickling not his thin upper lip. His
fingers grazed the puckered red bulb at the tip of the
twisted protrusion, slipped inside his nostril and scraped
at the offending blockage with the cracked and yellowed
nails.

He patted his shirt pocket and expelled a choked breath as
the gnarled digits jutting from his hands found nothing but
a spent pack of matches he had stolen from the pub down the
street. A glimmer of white ringed with red lipstick caught
his attention and he offered what passed for a smile for a
person who had not developed the facial muscles to do so
properly, having been born a mean and miserable bastard.
Those who knew him had long ago decreed that he would die
in much the same way as he lived: alone, unwanted, and
ridiculed.

He bent his knees and snatched up the cigarette butt. It
was still lit, though wet on the side that had been dropped
from one of the cars that had deserted the lane just
moments before. He shrugged his hunched shoulders, caring
little about the milk-white liquid that dripped back onto
the condom where the fag had moments before nestled, and
brought it to his mouth for a long drag that filled his
lungs as he lifted from his crouched position.

The smoke curled upwards and into his eyes. His nostrils
flared and he scented all that remained of what passed for
his social life beyond the screen of his borrowed
computer. Car exhaust, cigarettes, factory fumes, and the
lingering stench of unwashed bodies and sex. It had been,
he mused as the wind tunneled from behind him and caused
the rusted ‘for sale’ signs on the front yards of many of
the homes on that stretch of Arleston Lane, just another
night of ‘dogging it’ in Derbyshire.

“Funny,” he murmured, thinking about how the east Indians
and Muslims that were his neighbors seemed to be wanting to
desert the neighborhood like rats leaving a drowning
ship. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong ‘bout livin’ ‘ere, there
ain’t.”

A street light overhead flickered and sparked behind the
confine of its cracked plastic case and he jerked back with
a cry of fear. A hand went immediately to cover the poor
excuse for a heart. He struggled to regain his breathing
and then, when he was certain that a bolt would not pass
through his body as before, he went about his business of
collecting the spent needles and sexual devices that more
often than not passed for lawn ornamentation in this part
of the community.

Several hours passed when he had made himself a tidy pile
of needles and bits of clothing- a shoe that he would pair
off with another that didn’t quite match, a shirt which
could be worn backwards and inside out to hide the tears
and beer stains- when he heard the familiar scrape of wood
being pushed aside and turned his head to view the occupant
now stepping past a door that had not been hung on its
hinges since the hardware had been stolen to pay for
someone’s drug habit.

The woman clutched her purse in one hand and stepped
towards him. She cast him a look that suggested that she
had an idea of just how deep she would like to see him
sink, and with just how much of a mound of dirt she would
prefer to have heaped upon his head before the decay set
in. There was a time when he would have smacked that look
clear of her face and left her bruised to the toes for
casting him such a glance, but times had changed and she
had with them, and her apparent indifference had left him
feeling about as impotent as he actually was.

His eyes slid over the stiff posture of his wife, taking in
the lines on her brow, the hair pulled back into a severe
knot at the nape of her neck, and the over bright make-up
that she had used to disguise her pallor when once it had
been used to hide the bruises his fingers had left behind.

She wore a simple white polyester blouse with a serviceable
dark pant and sensible brown shoes scuffed at the front and
whose soles squeaked when she walked. She fisted a hand
and slid it into her pocket, rocking back on her heels and
watching him with the glazed, tired eyes of a woman who had
been betrayed once too often. The motion of her body
straightening stretched the threadbare fabric of the gray
speckled coat that hung from her rounded shoulders.

Shapeless and colorless like the woman it draped, and just
like the woman who wore it, the coat had seen better, less
threadbare days prior to being plucked off a second hand
store rack and purchased for her after the first government
check had come when he had been fired from his last job
after having only worked three days.

A better man would have winced at the sight of what she had
become since putting her lot in with his, but he had never
aspired to be anything other than the lesser creature that
he had become.

“Lynn,” his dull voice rose up past his Adam’s apple. Not
love, not sweetheart, but Lynn, the woman who was legally
wed to him but would not share a bed with him no matter how
much he pleaded or how many times he offered to keep his
mouth shut during sex, or even wear a plastic bag on his
face. She wanted nothing to do with him. “Off are you?”

“Aye,” her gaze slid away and she started to walk down the
street. He followed. “An none too soon judgin’ by the
looks an’ smell o’ ye. Try no’ t’be pissin’ o’er yerself or
yer son on yer way back t’yer computer an’ the only people
daft ‘nough t’be payin’ ye any sort o’ mind. Yer boy’s
passed ou’ an’ more an’ likely gone an’
killed ‘imself ‘gain, ‘e as, an’ I’m bleedin’ tired, I is.
Called them blokes wot be savin’ ‘is sorry life, I
di’, ‘fore I left.”

“Lynn,” he interrupted and raised his hands in a helpless
gesture. “I’m goin’ t’be betterin’ m’self, I am-“

“Oh, save yer breath fer the air ye be needin’ t’be fartin’
out yer arse. I’ve ‘eard it ‘fore an’ I’ll thank ye kindly
t’be sparin’ me from ‘earin’ ye ‘gain. Ye ain’t much o’ a
man, only half of husband, an’ no’ even half of tha’
t’bein’ a father. I keep apologizin’ t’yer son fer givin’
birth to ‘im wi’ seeds from one such as yers, an’ then
savin’ ‘is life e’ery other bloo’y day t’boot.”

He followed her across the street as she slung her pursue
over her shoulder. She had nothing in it but even she had
some pride and need to be keeping up with
appearances. “I’ll be ‘ome af’er I’m done workin’ m’self
t’an early grave. Lord be praised ifn’ He sees fit t’be
takin’ me ‘fore I have t’be shelin’ ou’ good money af’er
bad t’be burryin’ yer good for nothin’ soddin’ arse. Now
bugger off, I’ve a bus t’be catchin’.”

The bus screeched to a halt before her and the door opened
to allow her to enter. He watched her body slump into a
chair and her face turn away from his in disgust and all
that he could think at that moment was that he was hungry
and he hoped that she had the presence of mind to steal a
few cans of food from the grocery store where she had been
working for several years.

He spit on the sidewalk and started back home when the
ambulance pulled up beside him. The driver leaned out with
one arm dangling over the side of the door.

“Well,” the attendant grinned. “Need a lift, Leslie, lass?
We’re ‘eadin’’ in yer direction, aye. Brian went an’
did ‘imself in ‘gain, did ‘e? Christ jesus, I just got done
drivin’ yer other git t’emerge fer tendin’. M’haps we
should be offerin’ ye a family discount, aye? Well now, git
in, will ye? Ye sorry bastard, ye are.”

The old man hung his head in abject shame and entered the
vehicle. It moved slowly down the street and he noticed as
he stared down at his clasped hands that the driver’s could
not even be bothered to start the siren. His last thought
before he fell asleep on the gurney was about Burger King
hamburgers and a group of people a world away who made him
feel like the sniveling sot that he had become.




Ad: